From Our Foreign Correspondent.

Prophets of doom have said for a long time that Britain is past its genteel middle age. With the loss of Empire and the decline in manufacture we are a fading beauty. Is this how others see us? Last winter an invitation to the English Royal College of Surgeons was extended by the Iraqi Ministry of Health to examine local candidates for the Primary FRCS. By chance, a junior examiner? your temporarily Foreign Correspondent?was asked to join the party. Happily it transpired that his wife, who is in catering was invited too and was able to come as well.


From our Foreign Correspondent
Baghdad: Old, New & Us To enter into old age through the gate of infirmity is most disheartening. Horace Walpole (1765)'' Prophets of doom have said for a long time that Britain is past its genteel middle age. With the loss of Empire and the decline in manufacture we are a fading beauty. Is this how others see us?
Last winter an invitation to the English Royal College of Surgeons was extended by the Iraqi Ministry of Health to examine local candidates for the Primary FRCS. By chance, a junior examiner? your temporarily Foreign Correspondent?was asked to join the party. Happily it transpired that his wife, who is in catering was invited too and was able to come as well.
Not being used to such treats we accepted with alacrity. Older and wiser colleagues were given to mentioning gently that there was an Armed Conflict in that Part of the World. Our innocent response was merely to buy antimalarials from Boots the Chemists, and to think vaguely of updating jabs against infections. Who was right? Both parties, one can say.
What was gained by going? After all, anyone could have foretold that today's rigours of unexpected airport searching (lest you are a hi-jacking terrorist's Moll) and military street arrest (just in case your 35 mm camera slung under a jacket was really a waist-level gun holster) were fair risks. They in fact became reality but were not, in perspective, experiences that marred the trip. We had wanted to go in any case; troubles or no.
Next let me say that it was our dim impression from schooldays that the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates gave rise to City Life. Second, we realised that both medicine and cooking have a long history in Mesopotamia, and that Baghdad was an important centre in their development. University-type teaching also developed here: one ancient gate to learning is shown in Figure 1. Finally we appreciated (partly through last-minute perusal of a neglected set of Gertrude Bell's Letters to her family2) that there has been a long-standing Anglo-Iraqi connection. The visit confirmed all these intimations. The city buildings, old and new, even aeroplane security, our personal and cultural experiences in Baghdad showed that the various warnings and encouragements were correct. However it must be said that we felt an awed respect for what had been achieved in the distant and in the recent past in Mesopotamia.
The climate is not easy: summer temperatures in the region of 120?F are not easily borne2 (the local hospital admissions for heat-stroke today support this fact).
What else is there to say? As usual, the most predictable impressions from foreign travel are those that spring from problems common to the visitor and his hosts. For a start, the Examination Candidates ranged from the diffident (they left the scene remarkably early) to the impressively knowledgeable. Caterers in hospital and commercial posts, surgeons and pathologists, all seemed to be of reassuringly familiar moulds. There was no difficulty in understanding  Clearly, however, local variations were evident. Seasonal excesses (or deficiencies) in culinary commodities, and geographical differences in pathology 0 personally had not seen so much hydatid disease 'n 20 years of English laboratory work as in a twentyminute clinical Ward Round) were also to be expected. All these aspects were soon revealed in the modern 'Medical City' of Baghdad (Figure 2), where we were cordially received by our opposite numbers. Established and modern approaches obviously both have their place in catering and pathology in England and Iraq. The problems are very similar.
The unexpected lies in this. What training is the most appropriate? And for whom? Whilst working in this country we implicitly feel that a British attitude to training (medical